Skribit Blog

We here are at Skribit are big fans of Get Satisfaction.  They do a great job of giving our users a way to easily bring up issues to our attention and for us to interact with our users.

Here are couple topics that are currently going on at Skribit’s Get Satisfaction site:

We’ve been discussing internally about about implementing a reputation model for Skribit and what it would look like.  To get some external feedback, Paul twittered for some feedback, which eventually led to this discussion on Get Satisfaction.

We’re beginning to lay the ground work for creating PRO accounts, and want to hear your thoughts what you would like to see.

Finally, I started a discussion for people to share tips on how to encourage their readers to make suggestions.  If you did something that worked for you, please consider helping out your fellow Skribit users and comment there.

Being bloggers and/or readers of blogs, we all love RSS feeds.  Not only do they give us a great way to keep track of what’s going on a website, but it also makes it easy for people to share content across them as well.  That is why in the latest release of Skribit we rolled out a set of RSS feeds for everyone to use.  So if you don’t want to receive an email every time you get a suggestion, you can disable those notifications and instead subscribe to your suggestions feed with your favorite feed reader.

So where can you find the links for these RSS feeds?  They’re available on a User’s public profile page:

And also, on a Blog’s profile page:
 

(Notice that you can also now make suggestions from a Blog’s profile page on Skribit itself)

Another cool thing about having RSS feeds is you can use it to show suggestions on your blog if for some reason you cannot use the widget.  For example, I just moved my blog from a self-hosted WordPress blog to one hosted on WordPress.com.  Unfortunately, we currently don’t have our widget available WP.com, but I was able to use the RSS Sidebar Widget to show my Skribit Suggestions:
 

Here’s something else you can do:  From the Manage Suggestions page, you’ll now find the RSS feed for your posted suggestions.  Combine this with the RSS sidebar widget, and now you can show your recently posted suggestions on your Blog.

Some of you might have noticed that we had some uptime problem today.  The cause of the interruption was that one of our Skribit bloggers had a post that got dugg heavily today:

Here’s where we are at the end of the day:

• First, congrats to Jobmob on getting their post dugg.  Great post.
• Despite the downtime on our site and our widget, this did not affect the page load times of any of our user’s blogs.  We consider that a very (very) minor victory.  I wish I can promise you that we’ll never suffer from downtime again, but that is unrealistic.   What is realistic is to expect that your site will not be negatively affected when we have problems on ours, and that we’ll fail as gracefully as possible when something on our side does go wrong.
• About an hour ago, we made a patch to Skribit which should withstand the level of activity we saw today, and we’re continuing to explore other ways of squeezing more performance out of the system.

Lastly, I want to express that we don’t consider any downtime from a blog being dugg as being acceptable level of service.  We should be able to withstand many diggs without any noticeable affect on site performance, and are taking whatever action necessary to make that happen.

We registered ourselves today on Get Statisfaction.  Get Satisfaction is a service that creates a place where users can ask questions, request features, and just plain talk about companies and products.

Because our service offers functionality very similar to Get Satisfaction, we did discuss the possibility of re-purposing our service to do this as well.  We decided against this because 1) we wanted to open ourselves up to receiving feedback from a larger community, and 2) we want Skribit to be the best service for bloggers to build conversations with their readers, and stretching our service to do this additional thing only dilutes that message.

So our Customer Service site is open for business, please visit the site and leave us some feedback!